A Conservative MP is moving to question senior officials from the Prime Minister's Office about an alleged leak to a journalist.
Blake Richards has filed several notices of motion with a parliamentary committee studying the leak of the government's assisted dying legislation, C-14, to call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's chief of staff, Katie Telford, and director of communications, Kate Purchase. He also wants to hear from Health Minister Jane Philpott and Government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc.
The motion further calls for a full list of everyone who had access to the bill before it was tabled in the House of Commons. It calls for the witnesses to appear by June 21.
Last week, the procedure and House affairs committee heard from Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould about information published in the Globe and Mail the day the bill was made public.
Wilson-Raybould said she was confident nobody in her office or her ministry had leaked the substance of the bill. She said a number of government departments would have had copies of the bill before it was tabled. Health Canada and the Department of Justice were the leads on the legislation, but central agencies including the Privy Council Office and Treasury Board also would have seen copies, she noted.
"There's a substantive number of people that were involved and, given the magnitude and the transformative nature of this legislation, of course the Prime Minister's Office saw the legislation," Wilson-Raybould said last Thursday.
Richards said at last week's meeting that the "next logical steps" would be to hear from Philpott and the PMO officials.
Philpott's spokesman said they're aware of the request but wouldn't say whether she would go before the committee.
The next committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday morning.
"These are the basic rules of the House of Commons... It's part of the government being responsible to the House of Commons," Richards said Monday in an interview with CTV News. "The idea of privilege is something that ensures that those rules are followed and protected."
The Conservative MP says he doesn't know how many officials with access to the bill could be on the list he's requested. He says he suspects it was a ministerial communications staffer who leaked the information, while his Conservative MP colleague Scott Reid has theorized the leak came from the Prime Minister's Office.
"If the government was deliberately leaking something, if that's what happened, my assumption would be that that would be the people that would be carrying out that strategy," Richards said.
Richards has so far avoided trying to call to committee the Globe and Mail journalist who reported the story, although Reid said last month that he wanted to question her about the leak.
"It's not something that I've got any intention of doing," Richards said."It was made quite clear by the justice minister that the Prime Minister's Office was involved in the bill, and the health minister and others, and so that's really where I'm focusing... to determine whether the same kind of diligence was done in those offices and those departments as was done by the justice minister's office."
Investigating questions of privilege is one of the committee's most serious functions, Richards said.
"Our task is to ensure that the rules and processes that are in place for bringing forward legislation are followed, so our job that we've been tasked with is to try and determine what happened."
A spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office wasn't immediately available for comment.
Nick Taylor-Vaisey, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, said he doesn't understand the wisdom of trying to find the source of a leak on this story in particular, given it would be time consuming to apply the same investigation to all leaks.
"Why this one? I know that the Conservatives are talking about parliamentary privilege and that's obviously a foundational tenet of parlimantary democracy, but there are a lot of leaks," he said.
Taylor-Vaisey noted federal politicians are reluctant to talk about the substance of bills before they're introduced.
"We're journalists and we tend to favour more public debate about things and not less," he said. "If there were more willingness to talk about legislation before it's tabled then we'd be able to have longer public debates and ideally better, more thorough public debates about the big issues of the day."
